But would that make it Trump v. Harris?

If Joe, for whatever reason, dropped out.

Bernie and his supporters would sure as heck question that, I think, if Joe was out before the convention anointed anyone.

Anybody might question that, given the GOP might well run better against a woman of color not so well known they can't paint her as a crazy radical, which they are already doing without too much trouble.

Interesting question which way AOC and the Squad would jump.

Of course, Bernie actually is a crazy radical, but he's an old and well known white guy as well as a crazy radical, and that's probably a better combination for white voters Trump needs in battleground states than a relatively little known woman of color.

Though if Bernie bumped her off the ticket that might cost him nearly all the black support he would absolutely have to have to win.

Fox News host baselessly claims that 'something's going to happen' to Joe Biden

She just went a little over the line, maybe, in course of playing her part in Fox's propaganda onslaught that Old Dodderin' and Sleepy Joe is just a Trojan horse for flaming, insane radical black woman nutjob Kamala Harris.

All of Fox's talking heads are fairly shouting it's really Trump vs Harris and Joe is at best a signature monkey for the craziest, darkest (heh, heh) elements of the "Democrat Party".

More of that by now infamous Republican projection, I'd say.

Claiming Joe will not even make it to election night is just making the prospect all the more terrifying, eh?

The Fox News opinion host Jeanine Pirro baselessly suggested on Wednesday evening that "something's going to happen" to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and that it would cause the former vice president to be removed from the ballot during the presidential election in November.

"For some reason, I just have this feeling that Joe Biden isn't going to be on the ticket," Pirro said during a Fox News segment.

"I have a sense that something's going to happen before the election and he's not even going to be on the ticket, so don't even ask me if he's going to make the four years," she added.

So far as I can tell, she actually is further to the left than Joe B, and she was that at the beginning of the campaign, at the end of the campaign, and in response to the Floyd killing, protests, and riots.

And as she so painfully and forcefully pointed out during the debates, she was and all but incontestably still is to his left of racial matters.

I am truly not sure where that puts her relative to registered Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents.

But she is definitely to the left of this guy, my very own Democratic Congressman, and apparently also to the left of my Democratic Senator.

I hate it when they're right.

The NRA uses routine political methods to defend and advance a somewhat overdone gun rights agenda.

This DA is way out there as to means to advance a gun control agenda that is not, so far as I know, at all extreme.

NRA fights back, files its own suit against NY attorney general seeking to disband organization

President Trump slammed AG Letitia James’ suit against the group, calling it 'a very terrible thing'

The surprise would have been if they hadn't fought back and he hadn't deplored the NY suit.

The National Rifle Association is fighting back against a lawsuit filed Thursday by New York’s attorney general by submitting its own civil suit against the state official, accusing her of defamation and violating its rights to free speech.

The NRA’s lawsuit was filed in the federal court of New York and alleges Attorney General Letitia James “made the political prosecution of the NRA a central campaign theme” when she was running for the AG’s office in 2018, and has not treated the association fairly since.

“Despite hopes that playing by the rules would procure a just outcome, the NRA has not been treated fairly by James’s office,” the 19-page suit states. 

“The New York Democratic Party political machine seeks to harass, defund, and dismantle the NRA because of what it believes and what it says.”

The defamation allegations stem from James' public descriptions of the NRA as a "criminal enterprise" and "a terrorist organization."

“James boasted that she would strike foul blows against the NRA and pound the NRA into submission. She vowed that she would use the NYAG’s investigative and enforcement powers for the precise purpose of stanching political speech (‘deadly propaganda),” the lawsuit states. 

“She has begun to deliver on her campaign promises to retaliate against the NRA for constitutionally protected speech on issues that James opposes. As NYAG, James has regrettably succumbed to ‘individual passions, and individual malevolence.’”

All incontestably true.

While the lawsuit accuses all four men of wrongdoing and seeks fines and remuneration, none of them have been charged with a crime.

In turn, NRA President Carolyn Meadows responded by calling the lawsuit a “baseless, premeditated attack” on the group and the Second Amendment.

“You could have set your watch by it: the investigation was going to reach its crescendo as we move into the 2020 election cycle,” Meadows said. 

“It’s a transparent attempt to score political points and attack the leading voice in opposition to the leftist agenda.”

The New York Attorney General Wants to Dissolve the NRA

Letitia James may have a bigger ax to grind than Paul Bunyan; she ran for the office as an outspoken foe of the organization and called it a “terrorist organization.”

But she’ll have an easier time justifying her investigation by pointing at members of the NRA’s leadership publicly accusing each other of inappropriate expenditures. 

Back in 2019, LaPierre claimed then-president Oliver North was trying to extort him and pressure him to resign. 

North claimed that LaPierre had charged more than $200,000 of wardrobe expenses to an NRA vendor, and “told the NRA board’s executive committee of other allegations, including hefty travel expenses charged to a vendor and sexual-harassment allegations against a senior NRA official.” 

The National Rifle Association and its primary communications firm, Ackerman McQueen, have been in a lengthy and expensive legal fight since mid-2019, the NRA has been forced to lay off staff this year, and the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 annual meeting. 

In January, LaPierre reportedly told the board that they had spent $100 million on legal fees.

The kind of PC, at-any-cost ultra-lefty who makes me ashamed to be a Democrat

Not that the GOPsters are not as bad in their own way, with their opposed agenda.

But they haven't used months of riot and violence and destruction all over the country to force their demands, have they?

So is there really a "moral equivalence"?

Cancel culture at its absolute worst.

Make a desert and call it peace.

New York attorney general sues to dissolve NRA

Cuomo and the Democrats generally will be tarred with this brush, but so far as I know he can't fire her, she doesn't work for him, and NY state doesn't have a so-called "unitary executive".

Another symptom of the rising extremism in both parties, both as to ends but also and with more lasting harm and danger as to means.

I have little doubt the charges are true or that the conduct is perhaps even criminal.

But she is seizing on that as an opportunity to destroy a gun rights organization long absolutely hated by, well, the haters of the left.

New York's attorney general has announced a lawsuit aimed at dissolving the powerful National Rifle Association over alleged financial mismanagement.

Letitia James said the NRA had diverted millions of dollars to leaders including its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, for their personal use.

"For these years of misconduct we are seeking an order to dissolve the NRA in its entirety," she said.

The NRA described the lawsuit as a "baseless, premeditated attack".

. . . .

Responding to questions, Ms James, a Democrat, rejected the notion that the charges against the NRA - closely tied to the Republican party - were at all influenced by her own politics.

"We followed the facts and the law," she said.

"We've come to the conclusion that the NRA unfortunately was serving as a personal piggy bank to four individual defendants."

The case filed by Ms James' office alleges more than $64m (£48.7m) was lost in just three years as a result of the defendants' abuse.

Also on Thursday, the District Attorney for Washington, DC filed a separate lawsuit against the organisation "for misusing charitable funds to support wasteful spending by the NRA and its executives".

The New York lawsuit will almost certainly be contested in court by the NRA. 

The suit will add another strain to an already beleaguered organisation, facing congressional inquiries, investigations in multiple states and internal complaints.

Why does it have to cost taxpayers $ 2 trillion?

Biden plots $2tn green revolution but faces wind and solar backlash

His big spending plans - too big, anyway - predate the virus.

And if he had his way the virus alone would cost us another $ 2 or 3 trillion, for sure.

And these "environmentalists" want to lean on the dirtiest and most dangerous source of energy, nuclear power?

If humans are too stupid to be allowed anything pointy or edgy they are for damned sure too stupid for nuclear power.

The left of and beyond the Democratic Party see this as their chance to steal the tiller and ride roughshod over the center left types who make up the core of the party and by far most of its voters.

Trump is so wildly unpopular the Dems could adopt planks from Trotsky, Pol Pot, and Louis Farrakhan and get away with it.

They think.

And they might be right.

And I think they have.

(Kidding)

CNN and MSNBC using indigenista- and other racial - ire to bash Trump's Rushmore super-spreader

Tiresome, and as we get ever closer to the election you can be sure CNN and MSNBC with grow ever more shrill and ever more focused on themes of the racial left.

Presidential elections bring out the worst in both parties: the most extremist views of their activist outliers.

For Democrats, that includes lefties of all sorts who actually despise the party and most of its voters, and especially its white voters, for their politics and many also for their white race.

Yes, the Democrats are a majority white party, and absolutely need white money and white votes to have a chance.

The closer we get to a presidential election the less you would know that, from the propaganda.

Who has not noticed the increasingly vocal urging of the moral necessity of reparations and the utter racist immorality of opposing them or refusing them, on both networks?

In the present case, Rushmore is now denounced by CNN and MSNBC opinionators according to two lines dear the left who swear by Zinn and for whom A People's History of the United States is just true history rather than an essay in anti-American hatred virtually inventing the weaponization of history.

First, as racist in that the sculptor is alleged to have had some sympathy with the Klan, though never a member in an era when membership was without social or political cost.

And second, as a sin against sacred Indian lands (but the tribes agreed with the project at the time) and a evil validation of the also racist European settling and rise to dominance in the Americas.

Die-hards haven't all died, yet

Ted Rall.

If Trump Wins, Don’t Blame Progressives. This Is on You, Centrists.

It's not Sanders. It's the Bernie Bros.

Ludicrous, self-important little twat

And darling of the extremely annoying left.

If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them

An absurd question, with the Duce still in the White House and apt to stay four more years

Absurd?

Yes and even stupid.

Too gaffe-prone to be president? Biden's blunders prompt fresh scrutiny.

The too far left.

Is wealth immoral?

So The Times is too conservative?

People say that a lot at Dem sites where both "socialism" and socialism are popular, and capitalism is not.

In recent weeks, The Times' front page has been relentlessly hammering Trump, the GOP, the USA, white men, and white people in general for racism, sexism, homophobia, and other sins too numerous and too diverse for me to recall them all right now, featuring multiple attacks above the fold (online edition, of course) every single day.

At least half the links and stories above the fold, and often more than that, are such attacks, nearly all of which at least include if they are not limited to the charge of racism.

But the ever more conspicuous Zinnite influence on The Times, actually more strident some days than The Guardian, shows increasingly in anti-capitalism, too.

As in this story, in which hammering the US for racism and slavery (ended by white people at the cost of some 700,000 dead, 154 years ago) provides a natural segue into hammering the US for capitalism.

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

And yet, in this editorial - from the board, the publisher, and the editor, however, and in no way representing the newsroom or op-ed section - we see a defense of the Hong Kong rebels and a clear loathing of the red dictatorship of Beijing.

Hong Kong’s Challenge to Xi Jinping’s Iron Rule

All the same, most of the news stories concerning the situation have been sympathetic to the protesters and their aims.

The author of the article didn't bother to explain what that even means, or why (or exactly to whom) it matters

But he did make clear it's an endorsement of the most absurd imaginable layer of PC.

My guess is this actually costs her votes, the better known it becomes.

'She/hers': In progressive move, 3 presidential hopefuls add pronouns to their bios

Truly, this year it looks like the Dems are headed straight for a re-run of the McGovern campaign.

And it's by no means just the pols.

Think of all those Times articles using feminine pronouns to refer to gender-dysphoric men who have decided they are "really" women because . . .  well, because.

It's now liberal/PC dogma.

People's actual sex is irrelevant.

They get to tell us what pronouns to use to refer to them, and we have to obey or we're wicked and evil bigots, the most cruel of narrow-minded blah, blah, blah.

Who they want

The Activist Left Already Knows Who It Wants for President

They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. 

And if they have to pick a second choice? 

It’s Senator Kamala Harris of California.

How will that play in the general?

Also-ran Beto sounding like the racial radicals among the Dems, not just the candidates but the party as a whole.

O'Rourke tells immigrants 'this country was founded on white supremacy'

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) this week told a group of immigrants and refugees living in Nashville, Tenn., that the U.S. was founded on the concepts of white supremacy and slavery.

. . . .

"I know this from my home state, Texas, places that formed the Confederacy, that this country was founded on white supremacy," he said, according to the Tennessean.

. . . .

He made the remarks in response to a question about how he would tackle white supremacy if elected president.

To which the best answer would have been that white supremacy in America is a long gone thing of the past, and what people are really complaining of who say otherwise is the fact that the majority of Americans are white.

And to that complaint the best answer, if not "pardon us for living", would have been "fuck you."

I suppose we could quibble a bit about the nuance of "founded on", but those were certainly features of the country at its founding.

So, no Pinocchios for that one.

But this is just inflammatory bullshit.

Or maybe a concession to the lying racism of the person who asked the question.

"And every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression, even in our democracy."

Does his saying that, and to a batch of new immigrants and refugees, no less, show he hates our country?

Actually, I'm not sure what the hell it shows, though in his case I rather doubt it's that.

A lot of this year's Democrats talk like that, however, and maybe that is what it shows when they talk like that.

And, anyway, whose votes are they fishing for, with that kind of talk?

Is this that Tucker Carlson apparently said quite unfair?

All of it, or just parts of it?

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): 

The Democratic candidates for president are on the road this week telling voters that the United States is an awful country. 

"America's institutions are built on white supremacy," squeaked Beto O'Rourke at an event yesterday. 

Of all the lies these people tell, and there are many, this is the most absurd.
...

Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful, not at all. 

After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever.

In a recent piece in The Washington Post, the reporter put it this way, quote, 

"In Omar's version, America isn't the bighearted country that saved her from a brutal war and a bleak refugee camp. 

"It wasn't a meritocracy that helped her attend college or vaulted her into congress. 

"Instead, it was the country that had failed to live up to its founding ideals, a place that has disappointed her and so many immigrants, refugees, and minorities like her," end quote. 

If anything, that's an understatement.

Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. 

Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. 

This is an immoral country, she says. 

She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people.

. . . .

Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. 

A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. 

Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.

Personally, I'm a fan of the Speaker

Maureen Dowd:

It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade

“With all due respect, the press likes to make a story that is more about Democrats divided than the fact that Mitch McConnell doesn’t care about the children,’’ she [NP] said, referring to what she called “trash” stories about a supposed rift between her and Chuck Schumer. 

She also accused the press of “constantly enabling” Trump by allowing him to suck up all the oxygen and says journalists are “accomplices to their own denigration.”

“You would think that within a couple of days, 48 hours or so, of seeing that little child with her father, there would have been some challenge of conscience,’’ she said of Republicans. 

“But understand this: They don’t care.”

. . . .

The speaker, who is trying to keep the party center left, must know that getting Trump out of office is a goal that could be jeopardized by the fact that the Democrats lurched so far left in the first debates, with bilingual pandering and talk about busing and decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance.

This is the pol whose name was synonymous for decades with extreme San Francisco liberalism. 

(A “Saturday Night Live” sketch in 2006 depicted Pelosi, played by Kristen Wiig, talking to a pair of chain-and-leather-clad aides, one with a ball-gag in his mouth.) 

Now, astonishingly, the woman formerly scorned as a pinko is the voice of moderation, urging the kids to turn down the music and slow their roll or risk having a second unbearable helping of Trump.

“If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,” she said, breezily. 

“As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer from 30 years ago. I understand what they’re saying. But we have a responsibility to get something done, which is different from advocacy. We have to have a solution, not just a Twitter fight.”

. . . .

Pelosi is womanly — often surrounded by her children and grandchildren — and yet she seems blithely unencumbered by insecurity about her gender.

This is in marked contrast to Hillary Clinton, the only other woman who rose to these heights in American politics. 

She was certainly tough enough, brainy enough and experienced enough to take on Trump. 

But she was always getting wrapped around the gender axel, ignoring Tina Fey’s advice to take a bad-ass “bitch is the new black” approach.

. . . .

Her experiences with the last two Democratic presidents were not exactly a stroll down the Embarcadero.

Bill Clinton upended his party with his reckless, selfish affair with an intern.

She must have loathed that fathead; I certainly did.

But it started when he betrayed his own party the first [and, admittedly, lesser] time, saying "The era of Big Government is over."

Barack Obama never could have scooted past Clinton Inc. without Pelosi’s well-manicured thumb on the scale for him, and he certainly could not have passed the Affordable Care Act without her muscle. 

But in the midterms that followed, Pelosi lost 63 of her foot soldiers and her gavel; some in the party felt that President Obama had failed to supply enough air cover for the members who had gone out on a limb for him after Pelosi cajoled and prodded in a manner that L.B.J. would have admired.

. . . .

If combating an inhumane Trump requires a superhuman effort, Pelosi may be just the woman to do it. 

Her staffers tell the story of how, last April, Pelosi was with a congressional delegation in Dublin, about to deliver a major address to the Irish Parliament. 

As she got into her Suburban in the motorcade, a 300-pound armored car door was accidentally closed on her right hand, crushing it in the locking mechanism.

The attending physician could offer her only ordinary Band-Aids to stop the bleeding from the wounds on her hand and Advil for a tear so bad that doctors who stitched her up afterward said that she could have lost her fingers.

Pelosi not only managed to get through the speech. She shook hundreds of hands without flinching.

When I asked her about it, she was only rueful that she couldn’t concentrate enough to speak the Gaelic she had practiced.

The show must go on, eh?

How to lie when you tell the truth, and walk away all innocent like

Ocasio-Cortez compares ICE detention to 'concentration camps'

"The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Monday night in an emotional Instagram live video. 

"They are concentration camps," she reiterated to her viewers, who flooded the feed with comments.

Check a dictionary.

She is strictly correct, on the most general and innocuous definition of the term.

So used, the expression does not mean "death camp" and there is no necessary implication of any particular inhumanity of fact or intention.

And in truth our border detention centers seem to compare well with refugee camps in Europe or elsewhere, packed with illegal migrants as they are.

But dictionaries also note the term is sometimes used specifically to refer to the Nazi death or work camps or camps just as bad, or more generally to camps in which conditions are notably harsh and inhumane.

And from her remarks that is the sort of meaning she intended, and she extended the claim to cover the US internment camps where the Japanese were held during WW2.

And that makes her an egregious liar about both the border camps and the internment camps.

A flap ensued, with her devout left-winger defenders doubling down stupidly, ignorantly, or just fatuously.

The more she runs her mouth the more absurd she reveals herself to be and the less I like her.

AM Joy and Joe Biden

Too white, too old, too male, and too centrist (read: too happy with capitalism per se and not an early or enthusiastic supporter of the AOC/Bernie agenda; too close to Obama's and Hillary's positions on these matters, in fact).

The consistent line of the further left is that worries about electability favoring more centrist, white, male candidates like Mayor Pete, Joe B, and Beto are a trap and Republican Lite always loses to the real thing.

Cum grano salis, I think.

So being further left or more centrist, as the left now define it and really have defined it for years, is a question of not only class politics but what we generally call identity politics, the fruit and further pursuit of the civil rights, sexual, and cultural revolutions, rolled into one.

Hence the talk of reparations, of quotas for women, and the opposition toward not just Joe, Pete, and Beto but even Bernie based openly and squarely on race, sex, age, and, as it turns out, sexual orientation.

Recall how Pete in early days got a pass for much of his centrism because he is gay, and his stories of how he realized that and adjusted to it and is living it evoked great sympathy and admiration.

Democrats' ideology police have been hammering Joe Biden

Joe Biden Had A Very Bad Week

They already don't like him because he's an OLD, WHITE, MAN.

And they already don't like him because he's not exactly consumed with enthusiasm for the AOC/Bernie agenda, and not at all the guy to renounce capitalism in favor of socialism, even under pressure.

But he did bend on the Green New Deal and he cravenly and without a shred of credibility folded completely on the Hyde Amendment, gaining nothing but a respite in hostile criticism FROM DEMOCRATS.

Faux Democrats and outright non- and anti-Democrats of the further left have joined arms with the most radical of baby-killing feminists and anointed themselves the ideology police of the Democratic Party, and have largely gotten away with it.

I am sick of this bullshit radicalism and its hateful message

Clips of Warren being interviewed by Rachel Maddow show her echoing both Trump and Bernie at their angry anti-American worst.

The system is rigged, the system is fundamentally corrupt, blah, blah, blah.

I do not want the Democratic Party to go that way.

I do not want it to run against the American government, the American political system, the American economic system, and the American classe politique in 2020, as Trump pretty much did in 2016.

MSNBC is totally full of shit about so much, these days.

The latest?

Democratic primaries are about Democrats falling in love with someone.

And that someone can only be from the further left of the party, hopefully not white and not male and not more than 45 years old.

These loons are like the loons of Fox, they are further out toward the extremes than the bulk of their own party's voters.

They are hot for people who say outright they hate capitalism (that is the corrupt and rigged system they whine about) and prefer socialism.

Imagine how far they are from the American center.

One of their hosts just laughed in the face of a guest who said that Mitt Romney's public attacks on Trump make so little political sense that they are likely genuine acts of conscience.

She inadequately apologized for laughing at him only to laugh again at the very idea that Romney might have spoken from conscience.

Why is Ari Melber growing a beard?

Right now a bunch of "progressive" women on MSNBC are crediting for the emancipation and rise of women only earlier generations of women.

Rather as though black leaders celebrating the emancipation of the slaves totally overlooked the roles of Lincoln, the almost entirely white Union army, and the almost entirely white Republicans of the time.

It was, after all, a generation of men who adopted an amendment to the constitution to give women the vote.

WTF? White power OK?

Rep. Matt Gaetz makes ‘White Power OK’ Hand Sign On Fox News

Rep. Matt Gaetz looked just so pleased with himself for flashing a white power hand sign on Fox News tonight.

In case you missed it, there was an internet conspiracy theory that Zina Bash, a Trump aide sitting behind Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, had deliberately signaled on behalf of white power when she made the “OK” symbol with her thumb and second finger twice on screen.

Really?

The Aryan Nation has a secret OK sign using the second finger and thumb, differing from the ordinary OK sign that uses the first finger and the thumb?

But Zina Bash in the photo is using the first finger.

And being a descendant of Holocaust victims she just doesn't seem the type, anyway.

Phooey. Just bullshit.

Lucian Truscott goes there.

New Mueller Indictments Prove That Donald Trump is an Illegitimate President

Anybody who gets elected to office in this country with the help of the intelligence agents of a foreign power has been elected illegitimately. 

It’s not a tough call.

Proving that Trump and his friends at Fox have a point when they argue the real purpose of accusations of Russia intentionally influencing the election in his favor is to deny the legitimacy of his presidency.

All which denials are bullshit, of course.

Trump got elected because that's how the people, and the Electoral College, voted.

The voters voted as they were persuaded, and by whom or how does not affect the legitimacy of their choice or of the winner's victory.

Actual hacking, however, is a crime, as is collusion in said crime.

The Duce and his thugs could still go down for something like that, or for cooperation with the Russians in other crimes related to the election, if there were any.

Oh, and winning an election is not stealing an election.

Only falsifying the actual vote count or interfering with the counting process is that, provided it aims at handing a election he would not otherwise win to so and so, and succeeds.

It has been alleged that the Supreme Court's intervention regarding recounts in Florida during the election of 2000 was unconstitutional and intended to hand an otherwise unlikely victory to GW Bush.

If the allegation is true that intervention would count as stealing an election.

It’s all right there in the indictment — day by day, hack by hack, theft by theft — how agents of the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, set out in the spring of 2016 to steal the election for Donald Trump. 

When you track the actions taken by Russian intelligence in the indictment with statements made by Trump and actions taken on his behalf by members of his campaign, the picture is as clear as an iPhone photo. 

Agents of the Russian government coordinated with members of the Trump campaign and took cues from Trump himself in order to influence the election of 2016.

In announcing the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have refused to point to a victim of the Russians’ crimes other than to say it was America itself, but the intent of the Russians was clear. 

They took active measures over a period of at least nine months to aid the campaign of Donald Trump and to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. 

They stole the election for Donald Trump, and he helped them do it.

Not every liberal wants to take that Truscott line.

Chris Cillizza

In Trump's mind, any talk of Russian interference in the election is an attempt to undermine the "brilliant campaign" (his words) he ran in 2016 and somehow invalidate his victory. 

Why else would Trump launch into an extended riff about his Electoral College margin in front of the President of Russia and almost two years removed from that election? 

What does Putin care how many electoral votes Trump won? 

And what difference does it makes anyway? 

Trump is President. 

He won. 

The end.

Conservative pundit Brit Hume summed up Trump's remarkable blindness to anything beyond his own nose in this tweet: 

"Because Trump is unable to see past himself, he sees the Russia meddling investigation as only about him and the collusion claim, and thus calls it a witch hunt. 

"But the investigations are much more about what Russia did, as the House and Senate reports long since established."

Not everything in the world is about Donald Trump.

Attempting to get to the bottom of the meddling of a foreign power in a US presidential election isn't about trying to hurt Trump. 

It's way, way, way bigger than that. 

It's about trying to protect democracy from those who would tear it down from the inside out. 

A President who can't or won't see that is someone who is actively dangerous not only to the United States but to the world.